


Waking Up

by NikkiJustTalk



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Canonical Character Death, Coma, Fiction, Imaginary Universe, Imagined, M/M, Waking Up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-01
Updated: 2012-09-01
Packaged: 2017-11-13 08:27:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/501472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NikkiJustTalk/pseuds/NikkiJustTalk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loosely based on poor Oswin's plot twist at the end of Asylum of the Daleks. </p><p>Merlin hated to forget who he was, but discovered that he hates remembering more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waking Up

Merlin had it. He had everything.   
He had the stars at his fingertips and could bend the moon round his little finger. He could rise a tree from the ground and replant in the ocean, pushing and pulling at its roots until every inch of water was pure green and velvety, until it was a sea of buds and leaves, just waiting to grow. He could change the colours of his own eyes until they sparkled and put the sun to shame. He could twirl a single blade of grass around a gust of wind and tie it up in a bow. He could do everything that everyone and no one could do. He was magic. 

He’d walked up to Camelot on a whim. Stumbled down the road only seconds after his mother had packed his bag and sent him off with a note for the physian there. He’d been terrified. King Uther was a legend in the stories of darkness.   
In terms of hatred and love, he could’ve rivalled Merlin in power, in rigid determination and unyielding force. The many Uther slaughtered, the many Merlin loved. Brittle and battle scarred. Young and hopeful. They’d only every shared anything once. Arthur.

Arthur deserved his own story, Merlin had thought. He deserved the world. He was ignorant and oblivious, and hopelessly wonderful in every single way. He taught Merlin how to be someone he was proud to be. He wrote Merlin’s story for him. He took him on every quest, every adventure, and he brought him home at the end of it. He was red and gold and royal blue and sunlit silver. He shone. He became Merlin’s home.   
Of course there was Gwen and Gaius and Gwaine and Lancelot and the kindly guests and the strangers that helped them and everyone else who had ever trusted or been trusted by Merlin; but Arthur was Arthur. His purpose. The reason he’d been created. Arthur was his. He knew Arthur’s chambers better than his own, and he knew his smiles for all their value. Arthur knew his life, his routine, his heart, and well he should as it was always his. Arthur had been the thud of a boot on the training ground at the end of the day, a sudden, tired stumble and an impossible wish to hold him upright. He was the brush of fabric against stone that swept around a corner, the hand tightly wrapped around Merlin’s own as they danced into the shadows. He was the echo of steel amidst the cries of a battle field, and then he was the cry admist the echoes of a battle field as a blade caught his side. Then his was the head in Merlin’s lap, and the laugh was his too, desperate and scared as unfamilliar forces rushed through his bloodstream. Then everything that had been his became Merlin’s again, and everything had been ok, and normal, and fine.

And then Merlin had woken up and sobbed. Because a pain had woken him. Pain that wasn’t caused by arrows or swords, but by chemicals and electrodes and machinery that he didn’t understand. And he was a person that he didn’t understand. He had a family crying at his side that he’d never met, and a home he’d never been in, and a world without an Arthur in it. He’d made it up. His body had left him imprisioned in a hospital bed so his mind made up the perfect escape. An escape of fear and happiness and love. And conquered lonliness. And familliarity. And hope. And then these people he didn’t know had taken it away from him.

They said they’d brought him home. He was 26. It was 2012. He’d been in a coma for the past 7 years. They’d killed Arthur and Gwen and Gaius and Lancelot and Gwaine. They said they weren't real people. He wasn’t even called Merlin. No one was called Merlin these days apparently. His sister was her way apparently. He didn’t know how to have a sister, or how much she knew about having a brother. His mother was blonde and tall, and looked a little like Igraine. She wasn’t Hunith. They didn’t understood why he sobbed. Why he was mourning a man he’d made up in his own head. Why he was mourning someone that would never mourn for him because they weren’t real and they would never be real. 

There was an Arthur, however. He was a patient at the same hospital, a man in a suit with a broken arm and coffee stains down his shirt. He wasn’t blonde. He wasn’t tall. He didn’t shine. He was just called Arthur. There was Gwen too, she was his nurse. But she wasn’t called Gwen, and she didn’t call him Merlin. She wasn’t married to Lance. Lance didn’t exsist. He was a name of the firm that his father worked for; ‘Lancelot Janitorial and Paper Products’. Gwaine didn’t exsist either. The man in the bed next to him was called Dwaine. He died the day Merlin, or rather, not Merlin, woke up. He was at Albion Hospital in London. The license plate of the car that hit him had the figures ‘G41US 00’ on it. Uther was the surname of a man who’d been murdered by his deranged daughter and had been in the newspapers for several weeks now. 

He didn’t understand cars and trains and phones and laptops and football and pavement. He flinched at the first sharpened knife he came across and cried at the first flag he saw. Everything was loud. He wanted his life back. He wanted Camelot.


End file.
